May 18, 2008

I got back from my travels late Thursday, and since then have been plunging faster than I can comprehend into what could be a major writing project – stay tuned – that could allow me to at least for the duration to maintain this blog while not interrupting my other plans, which, contrary to certain speculation, are merely to go into business.

May 7, 2008

And on that most jubilant note I’ll be heading out of town for the next week and a half, where I’ll be thinking about what to do with my life and how to go about it, which this blog does not seem to be a part of. I’ll make a formal announcement of my intentions when I return. May the Force be with you all.

May 1, 2008

Justin has a new item attacking the scamps over at Reason for being such holier-than-thou jackasses about the astounding early success of Ron Paul’s new manifesto. I, incidentally, can personally testify to having been in line at Borders on Wall Street where over 1000 showed up for only 500 books available for signing.

As I’ve said before, I have no love lost whatsoever for the cosmotarians (even though I’m persently seeing one with some crazy race obsessions, but that’s another story), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more than a grain of truth to their brief on the newsletter controversy. Indeed, if Justin insists that Lew Rockwell was not the author, that seems to confirm what I personally know to be the belief of his collaborator Eric Garris, that it was Rothbard himself.

My sympathy, of course, is with my dear and heroic friends at Antiwar.com, but I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest in taking sides in the libertarian version of the split in the Socialist Party in the 30s. Little wonder I suddenly want to go into business.

I’ve always felt that Justin misses an important point about the Israel Lobby which is the flip side of a point missed by a lot of the left-liberal critics of Walt-Mearsheimer. Indeed I’ve found that most of the liberal critics tend to generally agree with the characterization of the Lobby itself but bristle at the idea that it bears the degree of responsibility for the Iraq War implied by Walt and Mearsheimer.

In fairness I myself struggled for a long time to arrive at a satisfactory answer to this question, and here it is: It is undoubtedly true that Bush wanted to invade Iraq from Day One for Freudian reasons if for no other. But the role of the Israel Lobby was a crucial one, and what it can be directly blamed for may well be an even worse indictment than to blame it for the Iraq War alone.

In the first year after 9/11, there was much hope that Bush would be a responsible statesman and make 9/11 a cause for international cooperation against terrorism and not for a clash of civilizations. This very much included his largely balanced public statements on Israel/Palestine for much of this time. But nonetheless threaded through all of this was Bush and Company’s consistent determination to attack Iraq.

What happened in my judgement sometime in the summer or fall of 2002 is that the Israel Lobby came to Bush and said “We’ll give you all the political support you need to invade Iraq, but in exchange you have to reorient the rhetoric around your ‘war on terrorism’, to make it in fact a clash of civilizations and not merely a rallying cry for the world community.”

One important point in this connection is how the “war on terrorism”, an already problematic formulation, became simply the “war on terror” of ghastly Orwellian implications. It was the Israelis who first introduced this noxious totalitarian nostrum in the spring of 2002 by speaking simply of “terror” instead of “terrorism”, and it got stuck in the American lexicon ever since.

So, in short, no, Israel did not by itself get us into Iraq, but what it actually did may well have been much worse.